Our Favorite Marionberry Foods In and Around Portland

Mari me.

Begin the day at the cheerily domestic
Hawthorne Street Cafe, which serves stolidly thick and hearty wheat
cakes—a bit dry, perhaps—with huge chunks of marionberry inside, almost
like a flattened marionberry muffin with syrup on top. But, alas, even
though it’s the end of marionberry season, the berries used in the
pancakes were underripe, which meant it was sort of like a Sour Patch
Kids pancake.

In the anti-flour power department, Tula
makes a delicious no-gluten streusel using some sort of Space Age
ingredient that tastes pretty much exactly like flour. The crumbly crust
on the tiny marionberry cake was reminiscent of every cinnamon-topped
crisp ever made by a church grandmother.

Everywhere I went with this sandwich, by
smell alone people were prompted to ask where it came from. It’s an
unlikely regional-fetishist combo of marionberry jam, Rogue Creamery
blue cheese and hazelnuts, on buttered and grilled bread. Well, it was
one of the best new sandwiches I’d tried in quite some time. At the
eastside location in the doomed Cartopia pod—they’ll soon move to the
Tidbit pod on Southeast Division Street—they’ll add smoky Muscovy duck
for $2.50.

Available at New Seasons or any Hotlips
shop, the local marionberry soda is made with just marionberries, water
and sugar. It’s a bit light on effervescence, leading to a syrupy
texture with a little pulpiness. But aside from the sugar, the mix of
berry flavor and sparkling water made it taste a bit like an old-school,
German-style schorle made with club soda and fruit juice.

This bakery moved out of its cart last
year, but it’s still making baby pies fist-sized and fork-free out of a
little shop tucked by the wayside of the Ocean food mall. Pie Spot’s
crenelated marionberry pastry is about the size of your palm—not nearly
pie-sized, not quite a tart. In practice, it’s a bit like a marionberry
dessert empanada made with pie crust. It’s terrific, with the most
substantial crust of the pies and a solid balance of tart and sweet.

Tiny Sweedeedee has a line out the door
even at 10:30 on a Wednesday morning, filled with those who apparently
don’t have to work: visiting San Franciscans, Japanese, and eerily
healthy-looking young couples. I wandered in on a hunch, and of course
they had marionberry pie: old-school, shortening-thick crust brimming
with thick berry filling. Get your pie to go, rather than gamble on
getting a table after ordering food from the counter.

Salt & Straw seems to have abandoned its marionberry
habanero blue cheese flavor for the time being, which is a relief,
because rather than stand in line for an hour with Minnesotans for
habanero ice cream, you can just walk three blocks and grab a cup of
sweet, sticky marionberry sorbetto (that’s Italian for sorbet) from
family gelato shop Alotto Gelato. When the sorbetto begins to melt, it
tastes exactly like the blender-mixed berry popsicles my mother used to
make in Tupperware molds, right down to the oddly satisfying granular
texture of crushed seeds.

This bright-orange shop in Kerns caters
mostly to young parents, serving plenty of coffee and doughnuts on the
weekends. But the best thing they make is marionberry gelato from fresh
berries, prompting me to make a special trip to the place in berry
season. The gelato is creamy, with an intense berry flavor that caused
me to gasp audibly, like a gawky high-school freshman who suddenly
stumbled into cheerleading practice.

Don’t be confused, this isn’t an official
outpost of the quintessential Oregon dairy company. But the restaurant
does have a confusingly strong association with the coastal cheesemaker
thanks to ample signage—the Tillamook logo is bigger than the
restaurant’s name—and many tubs of Tillamook, including marionberry pie:
a creamy vanilla ice cream with marionberry swirled in with little
chunks of frozen pie crust. It’s sort of awesome.

Burgerville marionberry desserts are what
childhood in Portland tastes like. Since back in the day, there are occasional marionberry sundaes, and lately there’s a sweet marionberry lemonade and
nonfat-froyo marionberry smoothie, but the milkshake endures. When the
marionberry sign went up on the Burgerville marquee when I was a child,
that was the cue for my parents’ car to U-turn into the drive-thru. The
milkshakes are pretty much the same as they ever were: swirly pink, more
sweet than tart, and thick with berries straight from Liepold Farms in
Boring.

Time for a nightcap. I generally prefer
whiskey no sweeter than Maker’s Mark. But while Eastside Distilling’s
marionberry whiskey may be distilled like bourbon, it tastes like
blackberry brandy, with the same heat on the nose and tannic sweetness
hitting the back of the throat. In the old country, we would have called
it schnapps, and at a gentle 60 proof it flirts teasingly with liqueur.
But it does not cloy, and the flavor maintains just enough complexity
that it cries out for curdy, after-dinner cheese and grassy tobacco to
stuff into a pipe.